One widely reported stat last year: Sallie Mae says that parents who are saving for their kids’ college education only manage to save about half of what they plan to save.

According to a Reuters report last year, college costs are up, savings aren’t keeping pace and parents don’t know what they’re doing (“55 percent said they had never heard of 529 savings plans”).

Families currently saving for college expect to sock away an average $38,953 by the time their child is ready to enter school. But according to their savings behavior, families will probably only save an estimated $19,784, about half of their goal, according to Sallie Mae.

As of Quarter 1 in 2012, the average student loan balance for all age groups is $24,301. About one-quarter of borrowers owe more than $28,000; 10% of borrowers owe more than $54,000; 3% owe more than $100,000; and less than 1%, or 167,000 people, owe more than $200,000.

Here’s savingforcollege.com’s “World’s Simplest College Cost Calculator.” It asks for one thing (initially): Your child’s age. Enter “0” and it’ll tell you — at the time of this writing — that you need to be putting away $561 per month. From there, you can make a lot of tweaks, like how much of your child’s education you intend to cover, the current cost of a school you think your child might attend, and more.

Using the University of Colorado’s estimate of $27,587 for in-state tuition and other costs for 2013-2014, and a slightly less optimistic assumption about earnings on my savings plan (I changed the estimated annual return from the default of 6 percent to 5 percent), that number jumps to $690.

Earnings grow federal and state tax free so long as the funds are withdrawn for eligible expenses such as tuition, required fees, required books and supplies, and certain room and board costs (restrictions apply).

If you are a Colorado resident, contributions made directly to any CollegeInvest savings account are deductible from your Colorado state income tax.

Colorado has four 529 options, and electing one of them to gain that state income tax benefit might or might not be worth it. Each state’s plans are managed by different groups, and you might well believe that a plan in another state will outperform the plan in your own state by a wide enough margin to more than compensate for the fact that you’d have saved on your state income taxes. One pro we talked to last year said he recommended an out-of-state plan for Colorado residents.

With both types of savings accounts, the work isn’t only in finding and saving the money — you must also elect how to invest it, which means doing some reading, understanding your risk tolerance and asking a lot of questions of your contact person at your 529 or ESA provider.

As with target-date retirement funds, some 529 plans can be set up to automatically become more conservative as your child gets closer to going to college. It should be noted, as it is in this great CNN Money piece, that this is not foolproof and in a major crash like the one that came in 2008, anything is possible:

The typical plan for 7- to 12-year-olds lost about 28% the year of the crash, according to Morningstar, while some supposedly conservative funds for teenagers approaching college fell nearly 30%.

you should expect to save one third of the expected college costs, pay one third from current income and financial aid during the college years, and borrow one third using a combination of parent and student loans. Effectively, one third will be coming from past income (savings), one third from current income, and one third from future income (loans), letting you spread the cost of a college education over an extended period of time.

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